2024 was another turbulent year for the global economy. With the ongoing conflicts between Russia and Ukraine, and in the Middle East, geopolitical instability continued. Despite some relief from inflationary pressures, the economic landscape remained challenging, with the continued stagnation in real wage growth doing little to alleviate the rising cost of living faced by many.
The world also experienced its warmest calendar year on record, with the average global temperature exceeding 1.5°C above its pre-industrial level for the first time in 2024. This milestone year also saw a series of extreme weather events, including record-breaking heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes in the US, and storms and flash flooding in Europe, Brazil, and Asia, causing billions of dollars in damage. These events underscored the urgent need to address climate change.
At the same time, Artificial Intelligence (AI) became a prominent business tool, offering significant productivity gains. However, it also increased energy consumption, posed threats to individual jobs, and introduced new business risks such as unintended bias. These intertwined environmental and macroeconomic challenges have emphasised the critical importance of our advocacy and stewardship efforts throughout 2024.
These intertwined environmental and macroeconomic challenges have emphasised the critical importance of our advocacy and stewardship efforts throughout 2024.
Amidst these challenges, 2024 was a remarkable year for elections as voters in more than 60 countries went to the polls. The year concluded with a number of notable losses for incumbents around the world, which is likely to bring new approaches to tackling megatrends such as climate change, the risks to nature and biodiversity, digitisation and AI, and new policy responses to ease the cost of living and reduce geopolitical conflict. Consequently, we maintained our efforts to engage companies and their boards to address these and other sustainability-related trends, ensuring alignment with their fiduciary responsibilities and those of our clients.
This report describes our stewardship work during 2024 and the outcomes of these activities. We have followed the structure of the UK Stewardship Code, reporting principle by principle to communicate our policies, processes, activities and outcomes to clients and wider stakeholders. We outline our engagement, voting recommendations, public policy, screening and advisory work carried out on behalf of our clients.
Building on last year’s reporting, we have provided insights into our engagement approach on human rights in high-risk regions; highlights of our public policy work in 2024; a detailed update on our collaborative engagement activities with Climate Action 100+; and reflections on our participation at the COP16 Biodiversity summit. Examples and case studies are also provided throughout to demonstrate how our approach works in practice.
EOS Stewardship Report 2024
EOS001375
